Dolmio are the market leader in the Italian food sector and can be found in over 2 million household across Australia.

Recently however, the Italian Food category has been in decline due to more exciting food categories such as Mexican. Dolmio needed to become relevant again.

We commissioned a research study revealing technology had hijacked family dinnertime.

As a brand that believes dinnertime should bring families together, we decided to do something about it and invented The Dolmio® Pepper Hacker. It looks like a normal pepper cracker but has a secret, unique feature. One twist not only cracks pepper but also temporarily powers off TVs, shuts down Wi-Fi and disables mobile devices, providing families with some quality tech-free dinner time together.

We gave Pepper Hackers to frustrated mums who helped us hide cameras in their homes to capture the experiment as it unfolded.

We shared our online film exclusively with one of Australia’s highest reaching news shows – The Project, supported with our research study.

A mainstream consumer, technology and industry PR campaign then rolled out.

The film went viral driving further conversations about the issue and views of the film.

We invented The Dolmio® Pepper Hacker, a pepper cracker that temporarily powers down TVs, shuts down Wi-Fi and disables non-native mobile apps, providing families with quality, tech-free time during dinner.

To bypass signal jamming laws, we created an innovative hybrid solution utilising existing technologies. We gave Pepper Hackers to mums who helped us hide cameras in their homes. We then released an online film on YouTube with a call to action to share and help Dolmio bring families together at dinnertime.

The film sparked global online discussion, with over 1.25 million people sharing the film on Facebook alone.

To say the campaign exceeded client expectations would be an understatement.

The campaign exceeded the KPI’s set for online views of the film by a staggering 16,394% (KPI set at 500,000 views).

In just 4 weeks we achieved over 3 billion earned media impressions, over 82 Million views of the online film and $27.2 AUD million in earned media.

Social media commentary showed our audience was inspired to ditch the tech and reconnect at dinnertime. Tens of thousands commented, tweets praised the campaign and it’s family-centric messaging and the film achieved over 1.25 million shares on Facebook alone.